Has the scourge of London headhunters been silenced?
Something appears to have happened to the anonymous individual who's been mocking London's financial headhunting/recruiting industry for the past 12 months or more.
The BlunterHeadhunter website is offline, with no excuses made for its disappearance.
The site's demise appears to be linked to a series of potentially libellous comments it made about one recruitment firm, which is rumoured to have taken legal action against the anonymous perpetrator.
As well as lambasting this particular organisation, the Blunter Hunter (who described himself as interested in, 'recruitment, headhunting, and venting spleen', and unable to resist, 'Tenants, Blue Nun and Dettol'), also ran some anonymous posts about recruiters' uninspired websites.
These included the observation that:
These are the clichés you need to create a really rubbish website for a financial services recruiter:
- Pair of glasses ("we're actually quite intelligent really")
- Telephone ("we'll be in touch all the time")
- Graphs ("we understand maths; just like you")
- Money (ditto)
- Newspaper ("we're up to date and we've got our finger on the pulse")
- Globe ("we have global reach; despite only having 3 consultants based out of Liverpool Street")
- The team (obviously not your team; your staff turnover is too terrible to both with shots of them on the site)
- London looking a bit... moody ("we're not a nasty little provincial recruiter")
Brookleigh Search and Selection and the Fox Partnership received special plaudits for their websites, with Brookleigh praised for, 'moody shots of London, pictures of graphs, pens and a guy on a mobile,' and the Fox Partnership lauded for its photos of paperclips.
Neither Mike Goggin at Brookleigh nor Philip Siddall at Fox Partnership appear unduly perturbed by the attention. "Any publicity is good publicity," says Goggin. "If people want to comment on our website, they're welcome to do so," says Siddall. "We don't post jobs there, it's simply a source of information about the firm."
